1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to generating natural language and more specifically to identifying objects in context in natural language.
2. Introduction
Natural language generation systems interface frequently with people in multi-modal communication. While current systems operate satisfactorily during most interactions with humans, one area of great difficulty is describing items in context in natural language. Natural language generation systems often operate in discourse environments where a number of entities are introduced into the environment shared by the reader/hearer and writer/speaker. For example, during a customer service system dialog with a user over a telephone, the dialog system determines it must show a user where a particular item is on a website, such as a link, form, or image. The typical dialog system encounters great difficulty conveying the location of the particular item on the website in well-formed linguistic expressions. Often the most recognizable and/or the most natural expressions refer to a position relative to the entire page or to other prominent elements. In other cases, the best expression refers to unique visual characteristics of the particular item. However, the typical dialog system does not properly or fully utilize this information, leading to choppy, confusing, malformed, or gibberish linguistic expressions. These poorly framed expressions can produce further recognition problems because of confused user input.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is a generally applicable, robust, automated way to describe items in context in natural language.